Episode 530: Product engineering and why does my team never challenge my ideas?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Listener Myamax myamax says,

   I just listened to episode 527 and could really use some advice on being good at interviews.

   I was recently laid off with a decent severance package, so I have some breathing space. I’ve had several interviews, and I usually get past the initial screenings, but I don’t shine in technical rounds.

   I’m a career switcher, and most of my tech career has been in analytics at a big company. I’m good at distilling things, very good at debugging and navigating mazes of corporate legacy, but I haven’t really built things from scratch. I’m not a pure individual contributor, not a product manager but some technical-product hybrid, and it was a fun place to be. I stole good ideas from different teams and stitched them together adding common sense on top. I spent a lot of time with users and stakeholders to understand their data and their processes. Most of the time they needed common sense and decent data foundations. Only in rare cases it came to fancy algorithms.

   How can I sell myself better? Should I be looking for more product-oriented roles? Maybe spending my severance building tiny end-to-end systems to get better at take home assignments is a good idea?

   I’d be grateful for any thoughts and your general interview advice for the software folk!

2. Hi, this is Mental Mario from Episode 395, where i was asking about being “the new hotshot in town”, as you put it. I took your advice, performed to the best of my abilities while trying to stump on my collegues work, and two years in think it worked out pretty well! I got my raises and will become the second in command after my boss. But wait- there is trouble in paradise!

   With more money obviously comes more responsibilities, but i can’t shake the feeling that recently I’m doing the majority of the work in my team of five. From refinements to troubleshooting, from code reviews to releases, tasks just come hurling to me.

   The team has a lot of confidence in me, but this leads to situations where they don’t challenge my ideas and approaches, which causes problems since obviously I make mistakes too- but I don’t have the teams safety net any more.

   This dynamic feels unhealthy to me. Is this feeling justified, or is this just the way it is when moving up the corporate ladder? Given that I’ll be the senior of the team, do i need to delegate more task and supervise them, when I’m feeling overwhelmed with tasks?

   Thank you so much for the show!